Do Some Lives Matter More Than Others?

A couple of weeks ago at the University of Maryland, hundreds of students dressed in black gathered in front of a campus statue of Frederick Douglass, the 19th century slave and abolitionist leader, to express solidarity with their peers at Mizzou over accusations of racially charged incidents.

And today, as the free world is still reeling from the suicide bombings in Paris, campus activists scattered throughout America are complaining that this terrorist attack has taken the spotlight off their issues of perceived racial injustice, which they claim are just as important as what happened in Paris. However, this campus unrest did not suddenly spring up full blown from campus organizers on the inside. The group that has been the driving force behind the nationwide outbreak of campus unrest is Black Lives Matter, a coalition whose powerful anti-American backers are fueled by a desire to bring our country to its knees.

Black Lives Matter (BLM) was launched after the Trayvon Martin incident erupted in 2011, and injected itself so forcefully into the Ferguson riots over the Michael Brown case that Ferguson protesters were actually declared runners up in Time magazine’s Person of the Year award in 2014.

However, like many previous protest movements in America, Black Lives Matter is based on a false premise. The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley described the group as gaining notoriety based on one “falsehood – that a Ferguson, Mo. police officer shot a black suspect who was trying to surrender – while it was perpetuated by another: that trigger-happy cops are filling our morgues with young black men.”

“Every year, the casualty count of black-on-black crime is twice that of the death toll of 9/11,” Riley noted, adding that “the Michael Browns are a much bigger threat to black lives than are the police.” To say that Ferguson provided the press with everything necessary to orchestrate an explosive response to the killing of a black teenager by a white cop is a masterpiece of understatement.

“First they told us about ‘hands up, don’t shoot.’ When that turned out to be a lie, they told us about the Gentle Giant. It continued for months, one lie after another, each discarded, replaced and sometimes recycled.” Flaherty reminds us of several of the lies, saying that “We were told that Michael Brown was shot in the back while he was minding his own business and trying to surrender.”

Flaherty added that “Entire cable networks repeated the lie day after day, guest after guest, promo after promo. Death. Murder. White racism. How could we not see it? Were we so blind, so immersed in white privilege, like a fish unaware of the water?”

However, instead of using Ferguson as an example of the real issues that are hurting the black community, the mainstream press has worked to cement in the public mind that a racial component was at work. Even after the grand jury report showed conclusive evidence that Officer Darren Wilson was completely justified in his actions, he was punished for doing his job by media-orchestrated public opinion and death threats that eventually forced him to leave the police force and go into hiding with his family.

Once the media narrative of racist violence in Ferguson had taken hold, events took a turn for the worse when the police and the National Guard let various businesses burn down. Despite the fact that law enforcement was outmanned and outgunned, the media and BLM protesters have continued to push the discredited “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” slogan until it finally became a nationwide watchword for police mistreatment of minorities. Not surprisingly, the crime rate has sharply increased in our nation’s cities – and many in the mainstream press blame the cops for this situation too.

Ignored by the press is the fact that groups tied in with anti-American billionaire philanthropist George Soros have contributed funding and outside organizers to launch Black Lives Matter groups on college campuses in order to manufacture outrage and fuel protests. Instead of explaining these facts to media consumers, our mainstream press has mortgaged the truth to perpetuate a divisive, harmful, and immoral narrative that threatens the very harmony of our great nation.